By Emilio Sanchez Vicario, CEO of the Emilio Sanchez Academy and the ES Academy marketing team
I was only 7 years old when I started my career as a swimmer when my parents arrived in Barcelona. From the beginning I realized the difficulty and sacrifice necessary to excel in this sport. I remember waking up at night dreaming of the line of the pool in training. I immediately started playing soccer at school, and when I was 8 years old, I picked up a tennis racket for the first time, playing one day a week. As you can see, I had a full week doing sports, two days of soccer, two days of swimming and one day of tennis. Every year I replaced swimming with more tennis, and by the age of 12 I gave up soccer as well, since depending on a coach to like you didn’t satisfy me. However, my admiration for sports of all kinds began.
Even though I was not winning much in tennis, I decided to quit the rest of the sports. Now, looking back, starting with swimming, moving on to a team sport, soccer, and then ending up in a more technical sport, tennis, helped me a lot in my development, but most of all each of them helped me to love the sport. What better than the Olympic Games to bring together all those dreams and illusions. There was a difficulty, I knew that tennis was not Olympic, although they were talking about including it.
And so it was. In Los Angeles 1984, tennis was under-23 and for exhibition. I was selected to play and although I was terrible, I was only 19 years old, I fell madly in love with the Olympics. Going to watch a basketball game or seeing Abascal win his medals was brutal. However the most incredible memory was seeing Mary Lou Retton win the gold with a perfect 10, the 10-minute ovation from the stadium excited, crying with joy touched me. Another brutal memory was the camaraderie at the closing ceremony, between Moracho and other athletes we tried to make a human tower, and although some from other countries joined us, we did not succeed.
Four years later, in Seoul, we arrived as real professionals and we broke all the predictions, beating incredible couples, getting into the final and losing it in an epic way 9-70 in the fifth set. We won the silver medal, and we did not realize of the magnitude of the Games until our arrival in Barcelona where almost a thousand people were waiting for us at the airport. Dreams were fulfilled, not only for participating but also for winning the first tennis medal. It was like the perfect courtship.
The global effect of the Olympics, if you also managed to win a medal, multiplied horizons that tennis alone could not even imagine. The Olympic Games are the most powerful media event in sport, and television stations make it their own to take it to every corner of their countries.
What else could I ask for? The next Olympics would be in Barcelona. We tennis players are not used to competing for a week every 4 years, we are globetrotters who play 40 weeks a year, and that at the epicenter of your career the Games are held in your country, in your city, it is like the opportunity of a lifetime to play in front of your own people in a global event. My expectations were very high both in singles and doubles. But when I got to the quarterfinals and played for the medal, after beating top people, I lost both in 5 sets, with Rosset in singles and Becker Stich in doubles, then both took the magic gold, and I was left with my diplomas. I never managed to overcome my disappointment and sadness. I had lost my great opportunity to marry the games, to touch the glory in your own home. The truth is that I lost a lot of motivation.
I continued playing, but it was never the same, my performance had dropped, especially in singles, and the Atlanta ‘96 games arrived. The rules only allowed five players per country, 4 in singles and one in doubles, if none of the players’ couple qualified in singles those first years they did not allow them to play doubles. How could we do it? Santana promised us that if we helped the team in the Davis Cup he would take me to the Olympics. It would be my fourth Games, although I only wanted to reach that record in doubles, but a month before the event the captain met me in Rome and told me that he would not take me. The world fell on me, the Olympics due to other people’s circumstances were far away. It felt like when the coach left you on the bench, my feeling of abandonment with the games hurt me in my soul, you do not know how much I missed Sergio in that 1996 Olympics because he had retired, but anyways we could not have gone as a couple because of the Olympic rules.
I think I’ve always been lucky, or I’ve been looking for luck, but the truth is that life keeps giving you opportunities. In 1997 with a neurological problem in my shoulder, my doctor gave me almost 10 months of recovery if I had surgery, and the truth is that mentally I was no longer so competitive, so I played some tournaments by invitation. At that time my sister Arantxa proposed me to help her as a coach, she was in a crisis and trusted me to help her get out of it. In the end I accepted, I worked very hard, but after a year and a half she won in Paris again in ‘98 and I closed the agreement to start my tennis academy, 2000 comes quickly and I went with her as personal coach to Sydney. The truth is that this opportunity was better not to have lived it, as a personal coach without being in the national team you can hardly go to see matches, nor access to training and less to areas of athletes. Besides, we did not do so well, and we lost before the medals. It was an Olympics to forget as a personal coach.
In 2004 the Spanish National television TVE offered me the chance to commentate on the Davis Cup and the Olympic Games, which allowed me to see the bulls from the sidelines, talking about what I like and watching it as a journalist. The truth is that it was a luxury, with that accreditation you have access to all the venues without restrictions and you can really live the Olympics from the inside.
Time goes by and in 2006 I took the reins of the Davis Cup team, in 2008 it allowed me to be the head of the tennis expedition, also with a Rafa who had just won Roland Garros and Wimbledon to Roger and had reached the number 1. At one point the team hesitated to go to China, it was a big effort, but I had to use all my arguments of the globality of the games and everything I lived in 1988 to convince them. Nadal was exhausted, but he found the way to beat Djokovic in the epic match in the semis and Rafa and Spain took the gold in Beijing 2008. Those Olympics were brutal, the Chinese stopped the rain for the opening, what we sweated that day was inhuman, then they made it rain whenever they wanted. Living in the village with athletes as responsible had its challenges if we compared it with other sports. Vivi and Anabel took an unexpected and heartfelt silver, they gave everything and had a prize.
That was my last Olympics from the inside, as you can see almost all were different. What I do know is that every year when the Olympics come, if I turn on TV I find it hard to walk away, the Games still have that magic. The athletes of the more than 30 specialties are special people, in some sports they have been 4 years training for that race, or that fight, or that match. The truth is that they deserve everything they get and they should even get more.
In these last Games the competitiveness has been more and more equal, what a 100 meters race we had, all under 10 seconds, crazy. Tennis has had an epic final with two medals for Spain, the sport that since ‘98 always had medals, at least one. A success.
I’m still glued to the TV. And watching this I realize that the next event will mark 40 years since my medal, and it will be in Los Angeles. I must find a way to go, I will try to go as a guest so I can see it and enjoy it. I start dreaming again, let’s see if I can be there and experience it the only way I haven’t yet enjoyed it.
